Hoyoverse has released its 5.0 version update Genshin Impact on Wednesday. While players are typically excited about flashy additions to the game, like new characters and regions to explore, this major update also includes more quality-of-life features. The developers have lowered the requirements for people to play late-game content and added a gadget that will reduce the grinding for certain items. But not everyone is excited, and some of the longtime Genshin Impact Players regret the changes.
The 5.0 Genshin Impact update, dubbed “Flowers Resplendent on the Sun-Scorched Sojourn,” introduced several updates that help lighten the grind in the game. The developers have opened up the new region of Natlan and its accompanying Archon Quests to all players in the early and mid-game, meaning players no longer have to slog through dozens of hours of quests just to play through the new story or venture into the region. Additionally, the addition of a new gadget makes building strong characters in the game a lot less tedious. In the latest version of the game, players can now craft custom items called artifacts, equippable items that grant character stats, instead of simply having to repeatedly play until they happen to obtain an artifact optimized for their character.
Now they are dedicated players who have worked hard in the Genshin Impact mines seem to have gotten a little salty over the years. In one viral videoone person posted text over the gameplay of the character Kazuha jumping off a cliff to say “how it feels to know I can now customize artifacts.” The top comment under the video, which has been liked over 13,300 times, said “these new generations will never understand what I had to go through to get my xiao artifacts.”
Another video, more than 1.6 million viewsshows a person looking happy as the text reads: “Genshin Impact: ‘You can now choose your substats for artifacts! No more endless farming!'” After a few moments, the tone of the video switches to muffled audio and we see a person crouched over a table with the text: “OG Genshin fans who spent countless hours farming for the best artifact.”
In the comments of these videos, some people say that changes like this “make Genshin easy”. This is my take: I don’t think that removing the grind and time investment in a game makes it “easy”, but I can at least relate. Depending on your luck, it can take weeks or months to collect the right combination of items for a single character. The process can be arduous and seemingly endless, and often left me questioning why I was playing the game at all.
But even then, I’m still glad the developers are making these changes. If anything, this is one reason why the developers should have released these kinds of features sooner. If people hadn’t worked on them for all these years — and the team had released these kinds of changes sooner — the bitter sting of what could have been wouldn’t be so bad.